Centralized Application Service (CAS) systems have rapidly become the solution of choice for many schools, particularly those in the U.S. health professional associations over the past few years. The primary goal of such services is to facilitate the admissions process for applicants, schools and programs, and the advisors. For highly competitive and specialized fields in which applicants tend to apply to many schools—often outside of their local area—a CAS system provides a variety of significant benefits.
For the school or professional association, applicant demographic data may be obtained and used as a tool to assist the association in applying for grants; support the lobbying efforts for federal grants programs, NIH, financial assistance relief, etc. The CAS systems also aids the school or association in developing workforce projections, future trends, and recruitment strategies based on accurate set of data and affords it the ability to assess and compare statistical data on applicants. The CAS can be a source of substantial non-dues revenues for the association.
To applicants, a CAS system affords major savings in terms of time and money. In addition, the incremental cost of adding an additional school is far less than applying directly to a different school. A CAS system allows an applicant to streamline the efforts needed to send the credentials documents to multiple schools. A CAS requires one application, one set of transcripts and one set of letters of recommendations, and test scores, irrelevant to the number of schools designated by the applicants. It allows applicants to research and compare the different programs in a systematic and comprehensive way.
Current methods for processing CAS applications involve processing tens of thousands of applications through a manual and labor intensive process. The existing processes require the manual validation, verification, and matching the official documents to the individual applicant. Thus, documents are routinely misplaced, hard to find, or damaged during the manual processing and filing. Further, current processes incur human error in logging the receipt of the documents, the creation and filing of such paper documents, the processing of the applications during printing, compilation and dissemination of the applications to the designated schools. Such errors have caused unnecessary delays and reduced productivity.